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Challenge: What Was the Last Year the Government Had a Surplus?

Written by Gary North on April 1, 2017

There are two kinds of U.S. government deficits: on-budget and off-budget. The one that gets all the attention is the on-budget deficit. It’s relatively small. The big one is the off-budget deficit. That is the deficit in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other government old-age wealth-transfer programs. This deficit is called unfunded liabilities. The present […]

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Jim Willie Cries “Wolf!” Again

Written by Gary North on August 13, 2016

He keeps trying. He is always wrong. I begin with a chart of Federal Reserve monetary policy. Since October 2014, the FED has pursued the longest period of monetary stability in the last 30 years. Let’s look at this chart from October 2014 until today. This reveals deflation, not inflation. This is not what is […]

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Let Americans Buy the Government’s Gold at $42.22 per Ounce

Written by Gary North on September 26, 2015

Everybody has a scheme for reducing the federal deficit. Here is my plan. Because the present value of the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare is now in excess of $200 trillion, there is nothing relevant that could be done by the federal government to increase revenues sufficient to avoid the great default. In […]

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On-Budget Debt: 3x Since 1/20/2001

Posted on August 22, 2015

A nice summary: We used the Treasury Department’s Debt to the Penny clock, which is a daily log of federal debt going back about 20 years. The debt held by the public and gross federal debt (which includes debt held by the public and intragovernmental holdings) are both considered appropriate measurements. But we only have […]

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IOU’s: China Buys Treasury Debt

Written by Gary North on May 16, 2015

China, meaning China’s central bank — the People’s Bank of China — started buying Treasury IOU’s again in March. It purchased $36 billion worth. It now holds over $1.2 trillion in Treasury IOU’s. China has now leaped ahead of Japan as the #1 foreign holder of U.S. government debt. Add Hong Kong to this: another […]

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Peak Debt and the Looming Crash

Written by Gary North on May 2, 2015

The phrase, “more bang for the buck,” is usually associated with the Vietnam War. It is associated with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s focus on statistics: military expenditures vs. enemy deaths. In fact, the phrase came from Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson. He used it in 1954 to justify the Defense Department’s reliance on nuclear […]

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Video: Obama, Yellen, and Ray Stevens

Written by Gary North on January 26, 2015

Ray Stevens had it right until QE3 stopped. But now Dr. Yellen faces a problem. Who will fund the federal deficit, now that she and the FOMC have stopped buying debt with counterfeit money? At what price (interest rates)? For how long?

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Keynesianism + Central Bank Counterfeiting + Aging = Stagnation

Posted on December 26, 2014

Japanese drew down savings for the first time on record while wages adjusted for inflation dropped the most in almost five years, highlighting challenges for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as he tries to revive the world’s third-largest economy. The savings rate in the year through March was minus 1.3 percent, the first negative reading in […]

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